With schools across 10 states, the P-TECH program prepares its students for good jobs that corporations pay well for
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — Suriana Rodriguez is only 19, but she’s already lined up a full-time job at IBM. After her junior year in high school, she interned at the tech giant’s Poughkeepsie, N.Y., campus, 20 miles north of her hometown, for $17 an hour. For a year, Rodriguez has worked 40-hour weeks as an apprentice test technician, examining IBM mainframes to confirm they work before shipping them to customers.
In 2014, Newburgh, an industrial city of 28,000 in New York’s Hudson Valley, was struggling with widespread abandoned properties and the state’s highest murder rate. A majority-Hispanic city where 31 percent of people are impoverished, Newburgh embraced a statewide expansion of the P-TECH program as a strategy for building opportunity. It launched its P-TECH school with a class of 50 ninth-graders.Leave us a voicemail at 922-6112 and we might share your story.
Rodriguez is the first Newburgh graduate to go from IBM intern to apprentice to full employee, but others are likely to follow soon. IBM, which helped launch the first P-TECH school in 2011, is now affiliated with at least 30 P-TECHs worldwide. It has hired 30 of the 240 students who’ve graduated from IBM-affiliated P-TECHs so far, paying each a starting salary of at least $50,000.
Newburgh’s trajectory is changing too. Gun violence has declined 80 percent since 2015. City Hall has launched an aggressive revitalization plan, bulldozing buildings that had stood abandoned for decades. “We were able to get businesses to return back to the city,” Harvey says. “We were able to get new home ownership. People are investing in our city like you wouldn’t believe.”, when then-IBM CEO Sam Palmisano was chatting up his friend Joel Klein, then New York City’s schools chancellor.
The first P-TECH, in Brooklyn, emulated the workplace learning focus of European vocational education while eliminating tuition costs. It established design principles that still apply to all the 200-plus P-TECH schools today. The entire program, including the community college courses, is cost-free. They’re open-enrollment schools, with no testing or grade requirements for admission, and they focus on disadvantaged youth.
Danille Jager is the liaison between Newburgh P-Tech and IBM. At a recent exposition for P-TECH interns, attendees got their passports stamped after they heard presentations from the students. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine At Norwalk High School in Connecticut, P-TECH students study web design. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine
This August, rising seniors at the P-TECH high school in Norwalk, Conn., gathered at Norwalk Community College for the P-TECH Norwalk Intern Expo. To mark the end of their summer internships, the students gave presentations on their work for their parents and their IBM mentors.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Tennessee lawmaker Kerry Roberts says abolishing higher education would 'save America'A Republican Tennessee lawmaker said last week that he supports getting rid of higher education in the U.S., suggesting it would help rid the country of a 'liberal breeding ground'
Read more »
Walmart’s Vudu Launches Family-Viewing Features, Premieres ‘Mr. Mom’ RebootVudu, Walmart’s video-streaming unit, is promising parents new tools to evaluate and control what their kids watch — including a way to skip scenes with sex, nudity or violence. The fam…
Read more »
'Hellmouth' Comic Crossover Brings Buffy and Angel Back TogetherBoom! Studios' reboot of the fan-favorite TV series expands with a new five-part series.
Read more »
Ciao! Want to learn a second language? Save 50 percent on a lifetime subscription to the Babbel appChoose from 14 languages and access more than 10,000 hours of high-quality language education online.
Read more »
Opinion | Is Majoring in English Worth It?From WSJopinion: The humanities have been infected by political correctness and “repressive tolerance.” It’s no surprise that the English major is on the decline, writes wjmcgurn.
Read more »